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Big News! Press Agent Gets Name in Lights

The Manhattan Theater Club has announced a new name for its Biltmore Theater. And who will receive that honor, one now shared on Broadway by a select group of people? Maybe a writer, a critic, an actor, a cartoonist? Perhaps an airline or a large multinational bank?

Nope. A press agent.

At a ceremony sometime before the start of the 2008-9 season, the Biltmore will be rededicated as the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, after the longtime theater and film press agent who handled the publicity for shows like “Finian’s Rainbow,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten” and “The Blacks” by Jean Genet, and who worked with performers like Bette Davis, Jackie Gleason and Gypsy Rose Lee. Mr. Friedman died in 1974.

Why Mr. Friedman? The Dr. Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman Foundation, which was created by Mr. Friedman’s brother and sister-in-law, will be making a donation to the Manhattan Theater Club. Neither the foundation nor the theater would disclose the amount of the gift, though Barry Grove, the theater’s executive producer, described it as substantial.

Commercial theaters are often renamed for theater personalities — the Jujamcyn theater chain recently rechristened two of its theaters after August Wilson and Al Hirschfeld, while the Shubert Organization, to somewhat mixed reviews, renamed two of its theaters after its current chairman, Gerald Schoenfeld, and former president, Bernard Jacobs, who died in 1996.

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The Biltmore Theater on West 47th Street is being renamed for the press agent Samuel J. Friedman.Credit
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Nonprofit theaters, looking for dimes wherever they can, have in recent years pursued corporate sponsorships, as when the Roundabout Theater Company, in part of an $8.5 million deal, renamed the Selwyn Theater the American Airlines Theater. But corporations have been making fewer of those deals lately.

“We always knew that the naming of the Biltmore Theater was a real jewel,” Mr. Solomon said. “We always had a sense that someone, hopefully with a connection with the theater, would show up and name it.”

During the past five years the Manhattan Theater Club reached out to interested parties, and interested parties reached out to the theater; some of those deals fell through and sometimes, Mr. Solomon said, “we didn’t actually like who they were.” In November, Jane Friedman, Mr. Friedman’s daughter, approached the theater with an offer of a larger donation than those that had come before.

“You know that old television show where a millionaire just rings your doorbell?” asked Lynne Meadow, the artistic director of the Manhattan Theater Club. “That’s what happened.”

The foundation’s gift will go toward the maintenance of the theater and to growing an endowment, Mr. Solomon said. Though the Manhattan Theater Club has been operating the Biltmore — on 47th Street, just west of Eighth Avenue — for five years, it will formally own the theater in October.

Neither Ms. Meadow, nor Mr. Grove had worked with Mr. Friedman, who died when the Manhattan Theater Club was only four years old. But the Friedman list of credits is formidable. He started out working for the Shubert Organization on “You Never Know,” a 1938 Cole Porter musical starring Clifton Webb, Libby Holman and Lupe Velez.

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Samuel J. Friedman

In addition to his work in the theater Mr. Friedman worked in publicity for Playboy Enterprises and the United Artists film studio. Among the movies he promoted were “The Ten Commandments” and “West Side Story.”

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As part of the arrangement a lobby in the theater will be named for Ms. Herz and Bob Ullman, both of whom were associates in Mr. Friedman’s office. A plaque will be installed in the lobby in tribute to “theatrical publicists past and present, who brought the excitement of theater to the public and who continue to serve as champions for the Bright Lights of Broadway.”

For Mr. Ullman, Mr. Friedman’s honor is a long time coming for a class of theater professionals who are generally blamed when things go wrong and forgotten when things go right.

“I must tell you how thrilled I am that they are finally naming a theater after a Broadway press agent,” said Mr. Ullman, who retired from the business in 1988 and is now an antiques dealer living on Long Island. “I mean, press agents are the patsies of Broadway.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Big News! Press Agent Gets Name In Lights. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe